The client sent us forty-seven bullet points. They wanted all forty-seven in the film.
I said yes.
That was a mistake I have made more than once, and the films showed it. Each one ran to about four minutes. Each one explained everything. Each one got watched, on average, once. The people who watched it were the people who made it. Then the view count stopped.
We noticed this pattern around three years ago when we started tracking completion rates properly for our corporate video london work. The number that stopped us cold was 23 per cent. Nearly eight in ten viewers were quitting before the end.
The instinct when you see a number like that is to question the data. So we questioned it. We checked the analytics, we checked the hosting settings, we checked whether the embed was auto-playing with sound off. None of that was the issue. The issue was in every script we had signed off without pushing back hard enough.
I remember the specific film that changed things. A financial services client. Good brief, real story, genuine outcomes. The finished cut ran to three minutes and fifty seconds and covered the firm's history, its values statement, three service lines, two client quotes, a team introduction, and a call to action. By the time the call to action appeared, everyone who wasn't paid to care had gone.
We cut the film in half. It took two days, hurt nobody's feelings directly because we framed it as a test, and we sent both versions to a small group. The shorter version held 68 per cent of viewers to the end. The longer one: 21 per cent.
That was the day I stopped saying yes to forty-seven bullet points.
What gets cut first
The first thing to go is the history section. Practically every brief has one: "We were founded in 1987 and have grown to serve clients across fourteen sectors." The person watching your brand film did not click play to learn when you were founded. They clicked play to find out whether you can help them. Start with the viewer, not you.
The second thing to go is the values list. "We are passionate, innovative, client-focused, and results-driven." These words appear in roughly eighty per cent of the corporate scripts I have read, in roughly this order. Viewers register them as noise. If your values are real, they show up in the story. If they only exist in a voiceover, they were not real to begin with.
The third thing to go is the explanation of things the viewer already knows. "Video is increasingly important for brand communication." People commissioning a brand film know this. They did not need that sentence. Cut it.
What stays
What stays is the moment where the viewer feels something shift. It might be a specific result: the hiring campaign that doubled applications, the product launch that sold out in a week. It might be a problem named so precisely that the viewer thinks you read their internal emails. It might be a short sequence showing the actual work. Whatever creates that moment of recognition, that is what stays.
The brief becomes shorter when you ask a different question. Instead of "what do we want to say?", the question is "what does the viewer need to feel in order to take the next step?" Those are rarely the same question, and the answers are rarely the same content.
How we work now
Our script process has a cut round built in before any client review. We write a first pass from the brief, then remove every sentence that could be called table-stakes, every claim any competitor could make, and every piece of context the viewer does not need in order to believe the central argument.
What is left is usually between sixty and seventy per cent of the original draft. That feels brutal until you watch both versions back.
The other change is that we no longer treat length as a proxy for quality. A three-minute film is not three times as valuable as a one-minute film. In most corporate contexts it is less valuable, because you spend the extra two minutes losing the people you spent money to reach.
If your most important viewer is a CFO with eleven other tabs open, your film has about forty seconds to earn the next forty seconds. That is where the script has to do its work.
We apply the same discipline to every piece that comes through the studio, whether it is a short internal communications video or a flagship brand film for a London launch. The question is always the same: what is the one thing this film needs the viewer to believe, and have we earned that belief before we start explaining everything else?
Most of the time, when I cut a script back, the client is nervous before the shoot and relieved after the edit. The forty-seven bullet points get to live in the supporting materials. The film does the one job it was built to do.
Ready to see what a tighter script feels like in practice? We have studio availability this month and we can start with the brief.
